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Getting rid of simple blemishes in Photoshop isn't that hard - the odd blot of colour and you're done. But Photoshop has a very powerful a tool for removing spots and blemishes from photographs - called the clone stamp tool. This is an easy tool to use badly, but produces amazing results when used well. In today's tutorial, Gavin covers exactly how it works so that we can use it effectively, and gives tips from the professionals on using layers, setting the brush opacity and using the posterize tool to expose the gradiants that you're cloning.

Great: So you've gotten that 200 Meg file open and you're blazing away with the Liquify tool. No fear. Photoshop grinds to a halt. It's never a pretty sight when this happens. The screen doesn't redraw properly; your mp3 starts to sound like fire-crackers at Chinese New Year and your operating system starts displaying snide remarks about your system resources.

Photoshop is a pretty intense program which often makes pretty high demands on your system resources, and patience. Ever have that sneaking feeling that if only you could figure out the correct configuration of hardware for your computer the dang thing would just run so much better? In this tutorial we're going to get to grips with the hardware required to run Photoshop and how to set up Photoshop in order to ensure it runs at maximum efficiency.

So the client has told you that they need to upload an image of the head honcho to the website - shock horror, he's so ugly that people think he's me. Now what? There are many scenarios that we might find ourselves in where photo retouching is useful or advisable. Usually however this takes hours. In this tutorial, we use a relatively quick method of photo retouching to get the best results in the shortest amount of time.

How are we going to do that? We're going to use blending modes. Blending modes are great, blending modes are fun; much of the power of Photoshop lies in being able to use them. But which modes are useful for what and how? Let' s take a closer look at them.

Take a stroll into the local TV sales department store and have a look at a row of identical TVs. Usually you'll find that the picture they're displaying (even when tuned to the same channel) looks slightly different. Each seems to have its own colour cast. So which one is displaying the correct image? We have this same quandary on the web.

No two computer monitors are identical. Well they might look that way on the outside, but switch them on and you'll see that they simply don't display colour the same way. Why is this? Well each monitor is manufactured slightly differently. This poses a bit of a problem: If Joe Bloggs's monitor has a slightly bluish tinge and yours doesn't, then when you design an image for the web, whatever you do will look slightly blue on his monitor. Tough for Joe? Well not necessarily. Photoshop has a built in system for overcoming this problem, it's called Colour Management. In this article we're going to work out how to use Colour Management to ensure that the images that we use are displayed the same way on everyone's screen.

Clients can be irritating. Especially when they change their minds about things. In this article we'll learn to work around this. What we're aiming for here is saving time. We're going to look at techniques to minimize redoing design work, by taking a close look at masks and how they can work for you. We'll also go through the production cycle of a design, and how to develop it so that any image that has been used can quickly be replaced by another - without having to redo all the effects you've used on it.

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